Identity, Theory, Life

I'm back--Kant and Adorno: whatta team!

2005-01-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

I have been away for quite a long time, I realize. I had other things I had to do. Anyway, I'm back.

I have been reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on the LRT as I go to work, just because it's one of those books people always assume you should have read. Well, after quite a few rides on the LRT, I have learned the following:

*Kant tidies up metaphysics in his mission to save it from pure idealism, religiosity or empiricism. He does it by stating what he thinks the proper business of metaphysics is.
*The proper business of metaphysics turns out to be a priori questions. Everything else is just psychology, or just phenomenology, or just ethics, or just aesthetics when it isn't "transcendental". No more messing about with everyday facts. Now the business of philosophy was to be "higher things" to do with reason, understanding and cognition.
*Mostly, this will consist of thinking about how we end up having ideas without reference to the sensual world or the world of objects in any way other than an abstract way (like in geometry).
*I have a sneaking suspicion that the marginalization of philosophy specifically and the humanities in general (away from science) is probably due to Kant's tidying-up tendencies. He didn't think he was marginalizing philosophy, but that is what happened. And he has written about his idea for a modern university--today, much university structure is based on models that came from some of Kant's ideas.

Today, I opened up Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics right at the end (I had to return the book so that I can recall it again) and there was Adorno railing away about the very same problems I have with Kant.

I mean, wow. I wasn't off-track while tracking on the LRT! Of course Adorno said everything much more nicely than I would, which part of why he got to be so famous. And good on him! Usually I'd read somebody like him first and then read the Big Thinker so it sure is nice to have things go the other way for once.

2004-09-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Where is my coffee?

Book Review: Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God

2004-09-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I was a little wary of this book. How can you compare fundamentalisms? But I am very impressed by her treatment. Armstrong's strength is her command of detail--the footnotes are there if you want them--but somehow she also manages to trace the patterns of fundamentalist development through the three largest monotheistic religions in the world: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It's not a perfect book but hey, whose is? As a recovering fundamentalist, I found much food for thought here.

Check it out on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0345391691/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-9845336-7461730#reader-link

Highlights
Doesn't start in the modern era, but quite rightly begins with the persecution of the Jews in the medieval period.

Maintains that fundamentalism is first a response to change within a religion, and then is a response to economic and social change in the modern world. It is not a throwback to an earlier time, but a response to problems in the current time.

Has a fascinating and readable history of Islam and politics, particularly in Iran and Egypt.

Makes it very clear why the war in Iraq is such a colossal mistake for the United States. The book was published just before the USA attacked Iraq.

Problems
Armstrong's division of all religious responses into logos (the response of rationality) and mythos (the spiritual response) works a lot of the time. When there is a clash between those world views, dialogue always breaks down over first principles. But Armstrong's insistence that having the two together makes a workable religion inevitably overstates her case, and it simplifies too much of the complexity of religious expression.

She does not mention why she focuses on fundamentalisms in monotheistic religions exclusively. There are Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist fundamentalisms too. She can't do them all, but at least she could mention why monotheism is her focus.

Summary
The strengths outweigh the weaknesses. This is a popular book and so it isn't for specialists, but it's a smart book too. In a world where fundamentalism has successfully put religion back on the political agenda of many modern states, it's worth figuring out who fundamentalists are, what they want, and why they are on the world stage right now.

Paul Farmer and Haiti--book review

2004-08-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.pih.org/whoweare/bio_paul.html

For my autobiography and biography project, I get to read books I would not necessarily pick up. This is turning out to be an unexpected gift. One of these books is Tracy Kidder's biography of Paul Farmer, called Mountains Beyond Mountains. Paul Farmer is a Harvard medical professor and anthropologist who also founded one of the most innovative medical clinics in one of the poorest places in Haiti. He and his organization Partners in Health are largely responsible for socially-responsible treatments for tuberculosis worldwide. Tracy K. likes Farmer and is irritated by him. Farmer does saintly things, but he is an annoying person too (how else could he get things done). He has an unswerving commitment to making the lives of poor people better, and he stops at nothing to do it.

It makes me think that all us profs should have a gig like Paul, where we work in our rich first-world schools for part of the year, and then for the rest of the year we work in development projects. Hmmm, I wonder how to swing this? One of the advantages of what Farmer does is that everyone can see how useful medical treatment is, although Farmer himself sees medical problems as social problems. And so he gets paid a lot and he doesn't have to work at his school all year. BUT, then he donates a lot of the money anyway.

Hmmm. I'm no superman like Paul Farmer, but I have resources other people might want. What if I invented an exchange programme for professors that allowed them to work in development projects...this bears thinking about.

Butch or femme or ?

2004-08-02T23:28:00.000-07:00

I am androgynous mostly. Except when I want to choose. But identity isn't always about us choosing. Try this test to see if you are butch, femme or something in between:

http://members.tripod.com/~womens_voices/BF100/BF100.html?submit=I+understand+it+is+a+satire

Why I Love Heather Mallick

2004-07-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

Ah, there are so many reasons. She's a socialist who is not afraid to shop. She uses words like "lickspittle" to describe our parliamentarians. She likes to read memoirs. She makes Michael Moore look conservative. And her column is in the biggest newspaper in Canada, where every week, we get to see her skewer right-wing politics and anything else she dislikes that day. Go Heather!

This particular column is great--HM goes after Linda Ronstadt and Martha Stewart for their supposed radicalism. Martha compared herself to Nelson Mandela this week? Wha? Give that woman another 5 months in prison. You're not a political heroine because you know how to match towels and oh yeah, aren't you serving a sentence for FRAUD? Somehow, I must have missed how it is that fraud and being in prison for leading an anti-apartheid group are in any way similar.

So Heather's point is that radicalism amongst the American glitterati isn't all that radical (she names some good exceptions). But I guess that the more interesting thing for me is that anything at all is expected of people in the entertainment industry. During the most radical moments of the 1960s in the United States, you didn't see too many celebrities saying anything about politics at all. The people who led the movements for civil rights, women's rights, disability rights, you name it -- were people who became celebrities because of what they wrote about and sang about. Except for a few key exceptions like Buffy Saint Marie (who was a singer before she was an activist for Native rights), celebrity was made in the context of the uprisings. Who would have heard of Gloria Steinem before that fantastic article about the Playboy clubs?

The idea that media celebrity itself carries a kind of moral freight is only a couple of decades old, and it's part of what Adorno and Horkheimer call "The Culture Industry," where big-business entertainment conglomerates seek to integrate the values of the entertainment industry into the world-views of the populace. I would have to agree with Heather M. that it's lamentable how few heroes and heroines for the left there are amongst celebrities, especially now in the United States. But really, what else can we expect? We should look elsewhere for models, and for intelligent spokespeople for things like human dignity and justice.

Communicative Action

2004-07-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

People do not post blog entries or even live journal entries for themselves. They do it in the hopes of communicating with others. Diaries that are written are unique in that the writing takes place in secret, and for no one else. If anything, the addressee is the future, perhaps the future writer him/herself. But the future is vague.

In order for us to talk to ourselves, our subjectivity must be split. There must be an object, a "me" to talk to. It is impossible to purely talk to oneself. We invent an addressee, give her a history, imagine that she has solidity as we ourselves do. Of course, this has been thought in poststructural thinking before, where linguists have discussed how alienation actually works linguistically.

But older than this, before we had selves, we sat around and talked to each other. Like Bakhtin says, to another, whose body begins where mine ends.

If we truly know ourselves, why do we produce so many narratives about "ourselves", this entity we invent? Who are we actually talking to?

Electric Identity

2004-07-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

In blogger, one of the first things we are asked to do is to identify ourselves in various ways. We also have an option to be as "private" as we like. I put this in quotations because privacy itself is a fraught concept that is connected to classic liberal ideas about property and citizenship. It's a modern idea, unlike "public," which is much older. Anyway, we are asked to identify ourselves with keywords. We can choose any ones we like, but we're told that this will allow other people with similar interests to find us. Keywords are key to community in the blogging world.

Most people pick things that really describe who they think they are. This is not a postmodern way to understand identity by any means -- it assumes that the markers we choose do express who we are, and how we want to be seen too.

So, it turns out that one of my favourite books ever, Raymond Williams' Keywords, is still as important as it was in 1976. Williams thought of Keywords, a collection of the meanings of words important to a culture that show in themselves how social change works, as "the record of an inquirty into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society."

When we are asked to identify ourselves, we are asked to participate in a larger world where these meanings are understood, and shared. We are asked to accept that the meanings of the terms we assign belong to us, but also to others, and that even if we ourselves exceed these terms (as we must), we use them as a kind of currency. We know that when we identify ourselves as "cyclist" or "surfer" or "lesbian" that we are asking other people to read us in a certain way.

Very little research on identity actually takes the fact that it works by keyword into account. It is just more obvious on the internet than it is in our offline lives, because in the case of the internet we use search engines as a kind of grammar for identity that help us look for sameness (and then, for community).

More on this later -- I haven't really figured this out for myself yet.

Tour de Lance

2004-07-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

Amidst the hoopla about Lance and the fact that no one can catch him, did anyone notice that Jan Ullrich finally placed right behind him? Don't get me wrong, I love Lance. I think that he's a brilliant cyclist. But I feel sorry for Jan because the best he ever does is place second. And in the overall standings, he's behind one of his own teammates, so he gave his team permission to support the guy above him. Now, someone from Lance's coaching staff said that Jan just isn't in good condition this year--a little too much sausage at Oktoberfest, I guess. But as a slightly overweight athlete who has to work hard at staying in shape, I'm cheering for Jan right now, even if all it means is that he gets to look at Lance's yellow back as he rides into Paris.

http://www.bicycling.com/tourdefrance/

Introduction

2004-07-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

I am doing this blog for several reasons. First of all, I want it to be a way to see how online diary writing works. I am writing an article about queer blogging, and it seems silly to write about blogs without seeing how one works.

But also, I work on issues connected to identity and writing, and since I have an extended time to research this year, I thought that I would use this space to articulate to myself (and who knows, to others) what I'm reading about, and whether it all makes sense or not.

And I'll throw in observations about my cats, home improvement, what it's like to live in a northern Canadian city, and outdoor pursuits I am passionate about. And hockey. And right now, the Tour de France. And feminism. Yeah, it'll all be there, and maybe there will be other writers in there too.

Let's see!